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Peter
Gansevoort
 Peter Gansevoort was born in July 1749. He was the eldest son of prominent businessman Harmen and Magdalena Douw Gansevoort. He grew up in the family home on Market Street.
Both
of Harme Gansevoort's sons followed their father
in family-based business enterprises. Peter pursued
processing (chiefly brewing and lumbering) and shipping
operations while Leonard practiced law and moved
toward public service. Like his brother, Peter was
an emerging young leader on the eve of the Revolution.
However, his budding career was put on hold when
war broke out in 1775.
Previously
holding a local militia commission, in May 1775 Peter
Gansevoort was commissioned a major in the New York
regiment of the Continental army. Rising to Brigadier
General, he served throughout the Revolutionary war.
He participated in the invasion of Canada in 1775;
was promoted to Lieutenand Colonel and given command
of the Third New York Regiment at Lake George in
June 1776; gained reknown as the defender of Fort
Stanwix in the summer of 1777; served at Saratoga,
in the Mohawk Valley, and in the mid-Hudson; and
was promoted to Brigadier General of the New York
militia in 1781.
He
was twenty-nine in January 1778 when he married Catharina
Van Schaick - the daughter of an Albany merchant.
Between 1779 and 1791, their six children were baptized
in the Albany Dutch church. Their home was next door
to his father's house on Market street and Peter
took charge of the brewery following the death of
his uncle, Johannes, in 1781.
After
accompanying General Washington on his tour of northern
battlefields in 1783, "the hero of Fort Stanwix" settled into a business life in Albany. In charge of the "Gansevoort Block" on Market Street, his economic focus was on grinding, lumbering, and sawing at the Snook or Snock Kill Falls in new Saratoga County. He had purchased the confiscated loyalist lands there at the end of the war and built a mill town there at the place now called "Gansevoort."
He
caught a cold during the winter of 1811-12 which
lingered for the remainder of his life. General Peter
Gansevoort died in July 1812 a few days shy of his
sixty-third birthday. His monument stands in Albany
Rural cemetery.
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Sources: The life of Peter Gansevoort is CAP biography number
91. This profile is derived chiefly from family and
community-based resources. Several substantial online
biographies further articulate his career. The recent
development of a tribute website bears some watching!
Portrait by
Gilbert Stuart, circa 1794. In the collections
of the Munson Williams Proctor Institute in Utica.
By Stefan Bielinski, Colonial Albany Social History Project [http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany]
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